The launch of AMD's Radeon 7800 series is on course for March, as AMD wants to complete the launches of the entire Radeon 7000 series before NVIDIA even has its first GPU out. Radeon HD 7800 will be designed to occupy key price points in the sub-$300 market segment, where it strikes price-performance sweetspots for gamers. Central to this series is a new 28 nm GPU, codenamed "Pitcairn", from which will be derived three SKUs: the Radeon HD 7870, Radeon HD 7850 2 GB, and Radeon HD 7850 1 GB. The specifications look like this:

Radeon HD 7850

20 Graphics CoreNext Compute Units, 1280 stream processors

80 TMUs, 24 ROPs (de-linked from the memory bus, of course)

256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, 2 GB and 1 GB variants

Clock speeds of 900 MHz core, 1250 MHz (5.00 GHz effective) memory

Radeon HD 7870 specifications follow.

Radeon HD 7870

22 GCN CUs, 1408 stream processors

88 TMUs, 24 ROPs (de-linked from memory bus)

256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, 2 GB

Clock speeds of 950 MHz core, 1375 MHz (5.50 GHz effective) memory

Some time after March, AMD will likely launch a "Radeon HD 7890" SKU, which will be based on the Tahiti GPU.

Seems they are trying to corner the market big time. What purpose would the Radeon HD 7890 have? We've already had the HD 4890 which was the last GPU released shortly before Evergreen's HD 5000 series.

essentially Cape Verde is Doubled or Tripled to meet the next performance bracket neccesary,

and we can already see the performance 7800 series offers just look at 7770 crossfire, same situation as 5770 crossfire was to 5870 essentially, it makes sense considering AMDs idea to design a middle of the road gpu they can scale up and down to meet market demands

AMD as doubled and tripled shader counts from CapeVerde to each segment
ROPs get increased by 8

so we have 640 shaders 16 rops 40 tmus
next step up 1280 24 80
next step above that 1920 32 120, gives a rough idea of what AMDs idea was with GCN
7770 = entry 7770 xfire = 7870 and 7970 is of course 7970

Notice the Performance jump 40% then 30% roughly what we should expect when the value of diminishing returns are taken into account,

These will probably be the cards I'm most likely to get. Again, there probably won't be anything wrong with the cards themselves, let's just hope AMD can figure out how to price them properly and not pull off what they did with Cape Verde.